Maker's Schedule v Manager's Schedule

Paul Graham runs successful seed fund company Y Combinator, and writes a popular series of essays the most recent of which is on the Maker's v Manager's Schedule which is important to understand if you are trying to manage writers, coders, designers, editors, or any other 'creative types.'

"Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it."

Lifehacker agrees that  requests to grab coffee can put you in a terrible bind:

"As a freelancer, I get lots of requests to "grab coffee" (as Graham describes) with folks who are just interested in seeing if working together is a possibility. Whenever that happens, my heart sinks. If I'm on deadline or deep in a programming project, grabbing coffee midday with someone I don't know and might not have any good business reason to talk to changes the tenor of the entire day.

Listen to a podcast of MsBehaviour on Radio Wammo for Kiwi FM.